ABSTRACT
Contemporaries gain an impression of decadence, a decad ence which is incurable. And they are not mistaken. The deterioration of classical Latin literature had begun with the Antonines. The barrenness of the third century is discon certing.4 At the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century, Ausonius and Claudian certainly write in an excellent style, the reason being that their work is a collection of centos borrowed from Virgil, Lucan, Ovid and Martial. In the fifth century, a prose writer such as Sidonius Apollinaris writes with intolerably bad taste. The so-called renas cence of letters at the end of the Empire is a mask concealing decay. It seems that the men of this period are incapable
of producing anything whatsoever out of themselves, and that they have nothing to say.
